Page 4 of Titan’s Mate

Titan stood alone in the center of the graveyard.

He raised his head to the sky, giving a great wordless roar of anguished loss.

I’m sorry, Mari thought. I brought the demons… She wanted to reach out to him, but the pain nearly drove her to her knees.

She heard huge bones cracking, and she looked through a red haze to see Titan shimmer and Change into an enormous polar bear.

The bear roared too, making the forest tremble in the face of his grief. He reared up on his hind legs, then dropped to all fours with a ground-shaking thud and lumbered away from the graveyard, utterly defeated.

Mari felt the flames, felt the demonic hands grabbing at her. She was freezing… burning… the demon was going to take her now. She had to… find Titan… Had to…

She stumbled out of the woods into the clearing, tripping over one of the markers and falling heavily to the ground. Through the red haze she saw four more markers in front of her. Mother, father, two children.

Carved in the likeness of the person they commemorated, with names incised at the bottom, above birth and death dates.

Except… the death dates were all alike. They’d all died on the same day?

She scrabbled to her hands and knees, turning to the next grave. The death dates were the same. Tripping and stumbling, she made her way around the circle. All the same. The same.

She thought she saw the ghosts again, screaming, felt the demon claws. She stumbled back, hands up to defend herself, but there was nothing but mist. Get away. Just get away…

Then somehow she was underneath the pine tree, with a black granite stone under her hands. Warm. It was warm, and the night around her was so cold.

She looked down. Glowing red hands reached out of the grave, reached for her.

No. No!

A face followed, rising out of the dirt, sharp teeth and evil, glowing eyes.

She could hear the demon laughing like hot burning needles in her brain, hands with sharp nails scraping the inside of her skull.

The pain exploded inside her head, and everything went black.

Titan ran straight through the forest, faster and faster, trying to outrun his grief and failure. He ran, until there was nowhere else to run, up and up and up to the highest point of the Wild Blood territory, where the land dropped off a cliff.

For one moment, he thought about running straight off into empty space.

But something wouldn’t let him. He dug in his claws and slid to a stop just inches from the edge, cutting great gouges in the dirt, and roared out his fury and loss at the moon and the stars.

Not that they cared.

Once upon a time, watching the stars had made him feel like he had a place in the universe, that he was part of something bigger and more powerful than himself, and all of it made sense.

Then everything went to hell, and after that nothing made sense, and nothing made him feel better.

Now the stars just made him feel lonely. He didn’t want to be part of something big and powerful. He wanted to be part of something small, something crazy and happy. His crew—the Wild Bloods. People who accepted him and loved him—who had his back, and each other’s.

A family.

He was a part of them—and he wasn’t. Not just because they had mates, and he didn’t. But because he was a shaman who’d failed his clan, and it was only a matter of time before the gods of his people finished his punishment.

Whatever it turned out to be, he didn’t want his crew caught up in the path of a vengeful god.

This ritual had been his last shot. He’d known if it didn’t work, nothing could save him.

It was only a matter of time.

After a long, long time, he heaved himself upright on his four paws and padded back down the hill towards his cabin.